Prior to the October formation of Kids of the Cinema, three of the group’s members played together in the garage rock band Accumulation Theory – a nearly two-year experience the musicians collectively described in less-than-glowing terms.
“We only played one show, and we only released one demo,” said Kids of the Cinema guitarist Luis Hernandez, who joined singer/guitarist Hope Selah, bassist Jimmy Brown, and drummer Xavier Coppel for a mid-June interview. “And I don’t want to say it was a lot of time wasted, because that’s when I met [Brown and Coppel], but upon reflection, we realize we were held back in that band.”
These lingering regrets have served as fuel stepping into Kids of the Cinema, which traced its beginning to the October addition of Selah. After fortifying the lineup, the musicians progressed almost immediately into writing and recording – sessions that yielded a new, self-titled EP, which the band will celebrate in concert at Rambling House tonight (Friday, June 20). It’s a sense of momentum that carries over into the math-rock-leaning tracks populating the recording, which incorporate off-kilter time signatures, fast-twitch tempo changes, and unanticipated instrumental flourishes.
The band members traced this musical evolution in large part to more democratic approach to writing taken within Kids of the Cinema. While Accumulation Theory generally built songs around the guitar riffs created by Hernandez and then plowed forward in a way that allowed little space for back and forth, KotC will evolve songs over longer stretches. Brown said the band rewrote “Speaking,” for one, four times over the course of a month before landing on a version that felt right – a process that has allowed the music to better reflect the differing personalities of the individual players.
“There’s something about this project that allows each of us to flourish,” Hernandez said. “When you listen to the EP, I think each song has this moment where I can say, ‘Oh, that’s cool, I remember when Hope did this’ or ‘I remember when Jimmy proposed this idea.’ It’s much more of a collaboration.”
Two of the EP’s four tracks were largely completed sans lyrics before Selah joined the fold, which proved a challenge when she took initial stabs at writing. “I think I had the most trouble with ‘Speaking,’ because they wrote the instrumental without me, and mostly in 7/8,” the singer said. “I would start by humming a melody, and I would naturally want to resolve it on the eighth, but I couldn’t, because it was in 7/8 measure.”
And so, Selah learned to adapt her approach, uploading the instrumental into Logic Pro and sectioning the track off into verses, the chorus, and a bridge, and then writing individually to each.
While Selah broke things down to a granular level in order to find where her voice could best exist within these songs, her words explored loosely related ideas on a grander scale, evoking a search for greater meaning, the desire to suss out a sense of purpose, and a want to find the places and people with whom you best fit.
Selah said she started to write “I Have Time,” for one, during her freshman year at Capital University, completing the recording ahead of her graduation last month, and the song captures the potential existent in those years. “Knowledge, strength, and power/Found in the soil of those before us,” she sings. “Someday hope to grow my garden there.” “Flock of Faces (Behavior),” meanwhile, ping-pongs between slinky passages and crunchy guitar outbursts before expanding into a spacious, melodic bridge – a sonic landscape that Selah said allowed her to conduct a significantly deeper lyrical excavation than she has in the past.
“I wrote from that bridge, and as I was writing it, I was really feeling those emotions, and the truth started to come out as the instrumentation built,” said Selah. “Not to get too into the feels, but since I’ve been writing, and especially more recently, there’s always been that sense of what’s next? What’s the next step? I think we’re all adults that are just searching for purpose.”
发表回复